The Simple Business Plan | Financial Toolkit
Most business plan guides tell you what to include. They rarely show you what a good version of it actually looks like — or what a weak one looks like, so you can tell the difference. The Simple Business Plan does both. Every section of the plan is broken into three parts: what it is and why it matters, the exact steps to write it, and a full worked example — plus a deliberately weak version of the same section, so you can see precisely what separates a plan that gets funded from one that gets set aside.The whole guide follows one running example, Cedar & Sage Co., from idea to a finished, fundable plan — so you're never staring at an abstract template wondering how it applies to a real business. And because a business plan lives or dies on its numbers, this book comes with a companion spreadsheet, the Business Plan Financial Toolkit: eight fully linked tabs — Assumptions, Startup Costs, Operating Costs, Revenue & Sales, Profit & Loss, Cashflow, and Balance Sheet — that do every calculation automatically. Fill in the yellow cells with your own numbers, and the rest of the model, including your break-even month, updates itself.What's inside: Every section of a business plan, explained in plain language: Executive Summary, Company Description, Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Marketing & Sales, Organization & Management, and a three-part Financial Plan A strong example and a weak example for every section, so you can see exactly what to avoid "Adapt This" notes throughout, showing how to apply each section to a service business, a retail shop, an online store, or a consultancy Four industry playbooks with worked mini-examples: service & consulting, retail, online/e-commerce, and food & beverage "Your Turn" worksheets so you can draft each section as you read A full sample business plan, assembled start to finish, to use as a model A section-by-section checklist, a glossary of financial terms, and a common-mistakes chapter to sanity-check your draft before you send it anywhere The companion 8-tab Business Plan Financial Toolkit spreadsheet — linked formulas, no math required Who it's for: first-time founders writing a plan for a lender or investor, anyone leaving a job to start a business full-time, and existing business owners who've never put their numbers in writing. No finance background needed — every dollar figure in the book is explained in plain terms before it's used.By the end, you won't just have a business plan template — you'll have a finished plan for your own business, and the same spreadsheet you used to build it, ready to keep tracking your numbers after you launch
Get it → nextchapterdp.gumroad.com